Five Ways To Improve GMB Ranking

five-ways-to-improve-your

*Updated May 3rd 2022

I’ve already written about how to optimize your Google My Business listing. And how to get reviews for it.

But recently I’ve been asked a lot by local business owners about how to improve their Google My Business rankings in 2019. Once you have optimized your Google My Business listing, it comes down to five things which I am about to explain.

#1 – Business Listings

Getting ranked high within Google My Business comes down to Google verifying that your business is real. It does this by determining how often your business name, address and phone number (NAP) is cited or listed on the internet. It’s the exact same as how backlinks act for search engine optimization. The more you have, usually the better your search rankings will be.

The easiest way to get cited or listed is to submit your business to local and national business directories. Our Google My Business package includes listing your business in the top 50 directories you are not listed in.

#2 – Consistent NAP

The way your business NAP (name, address and phone number) is listed in these directories, on your websites contact page and within the Google My Business listing must be consistent and up to date. Here’s how to ensure your business NAP is consistent across the web. Google website crawlers will get confused should you have a different NAP listed on various business directories.

To make sure your NAP is consistent, do a search for your business. Click to see what every listing of it looks like. If the information is incorrect on a website, contact them and have it changed. This is something a few of our clients have had to do as they’ve changed addresses or phone numbers. Using the best local SEO software out there, we can track our clients business listings to see their NAP.

Here’s a look at one of our clients with a very solid NAP score.

google-my-business-nap-score

Here is a potential lead that has a very poor NAP score.

google-my-business-poor-nap-score

#3 – NAP On Website

You will also need to list your business name address and phone number on your website. I’ve read other SEO companies say it’s good to have it in the footer or header of your website so it shows on every page. If you can do this, then go head as it’s good for the user experience. I’ve found that it’s fine to have the name, address and phone number listed on the contact page. Bonus points if you do so using the Schema markup.

Here’s an example of our NAP on the contact page.

nap-on-contact-page

Got all this so far? Great! There is one more thing that should be on your contact page.

#4 – Embedded Google Map

If you go to our contact page, you’ll see an embedded Google map. It’s good practice to have your businesses Google My Business listing embedded on your contact page. This way Google can be certain you are located at the address you have listed by confirming that with your Places listing.

Embedding is easy. Simply search your business name while in Google Maps. Once you have found it click on three lines beside your business name in the search bar on the top left. Then you can click on “Share or Embed Map”.

local-seo-consultant

Once that is selected, click the embed map option at the top of the pop up box. Then copy the iframe code and paste it into your contact page.

The last and most important factor to improving the ranking of your Google My Business listing is coming up next.

#5 – Reviews

You need to get everyone to review your page. This blog post and this blog post cover two easy ways to get more Google reviews.

Think about it. If Google sees a page with 20 or more reviews, won’t it want to show that page in the mapped listings over a page that doesn’t have any reviews?

This falls in line with Google’s approach to search. Providing the searcher with the most relevant search result and business.

Reviews must have overall positive sentiments. They are important local SEO ranking factors to influence your local rankings. Additionally, the below infographic shows some important factors to consider:

Local SEO Ranking Factor

Evaluate Rankings

Once you have changed what is above and still notice your rankings are low, then you might need to have your business cited more. You can do this two ways.

  1. Find out where those competitors who rank higher than you are cited. Do a search for their business and if they come up in a directory, find out if your business is listed there. If it’s not, add it.
  2. Take advantage of our Google My Business package and the citation building service within it.

Much like SEO, Google uses business citations as a means to provide their searchers with the most relevant businesses within the Google Places rankings. Follow the instructions I have laid out in this post and watch your rankings improve. If you need help with your rankings, visit our Google My Business packages page for different packages and services aimed at improving your rankings.